A Suitcase and a Dog

March 9th. I pack one suitcase, grab my dog, and point the whole operation south.

Orlando, Florida.

The original plan was two to three months. I'm writing this seven months later.

God's plans are funny like that.

That was the entire estate. Forty-six years old, twenty-plus years in business, and everything that mattered fit in one bag.

Part of that was reality. Part of it was a choice. After seven stops in under six months, I wasn't interested in owning anything that couldn't be packed in ten minutes.

When the floor keeps giving out, you stop seeing possessions. You start seeing weight.

Seneca: "It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."

I had very little. But for the first time in a long time, I wasn't craving more. I was craving enough. Enough fit in a suitcase.

Riding shotgun, like he'd done a hundred times before, was Sheldon. Seven and a half pounds of Yorkie who'd been through all of it with me. The jail years. The cold car in a Michigan winter.

He doesn't know any of that. He knows walks, breakfast, and which squirrels have been disrespectful lately.

When your life has been a story you're ashamed of, there's a strange relief in being loved by somebody who never read the story. That's grace too. The small, daily kind that rides in the passenger seat.

The first couple of months, we were downtown.

Morning walks to Lake Eola. Watch the water, watch the swans, watch the city wake up. Then a shorter loop around the block. Same rhythm, every day.

When your whole life fits in one suitcase, routine is the furniture.

You can't make a place feel like home with stuff when you don't have stuff. So you do it with time. Same walk, same hour, same first thing every morning. Those become the walls.

I learned the opposite during the cycle. When everything kept moving, the first thing to go was my routine. And when the routine went, everything else got harder.

So in Orlando, I built the routine first. Before the business. Before anything.

Look at the floor I set every Sunday. The walk with Sheldon is right there near the top. That's not an accident. Before there was a list, there was a walk.

Church. Networking. Coffee meetings. Work started coming in. Not fast. Steady.

And after the hacked account and the clients who stiffed me, steady felt like a miracle.

For most of my career, I didn't want steady. I wanted big. Big launches, big months, big wins.

Then I lived through a stretch where nothing was steady, and I learned what boring actually is. Boring is not knowing if you can pay for the room.

Steady isn't boring. Steady is peace.

A big month you can't repeat is a party. A steady line you can count on is a business.

About a week and a half after I landed, I met someone.

And it drastically changed everything. In the best way possible.

It wasn't planned. It wasn't on any vision board. It just happened.

After a year like mine, you get great reflexes for bad news. You have none for good news. Good news feels like a setup.

So here's what I decided. If shame gets a voice every time something goes wrong, grace gets a voice every time something goes right. Not a suspicious one. A grateful one.

I came down here with a plan. Two to three months. Reset. Figure out the next move.

The plan was small because my belief was small.

And life didn't care about my plan. The routine, the city, the people, the person. None of it was in the plan.

Proverbs 16:9. "A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps."

To be clear, Florida didn't fix me. Palm trees don't fix anybody. Seneca told a friend who kept traveling to escape his unhappiness that he needed a change of soul, not a change of climate.

That change had started in a jail kitchen and a basement in Michigan. Orlando just gave it room to grow.

Little did I know what God had in store.

I landed with one suitcase and a dog and a timeline I made up in a basement in Michigan.

The timeline was wrong. The suitcase was enough.

Sometimes the plan isn't the thing that carries you. It's just the thing that gets you out of the driveway.

The plan said three months. Life said stay.

And for the first time in years, staying didn't feel like falling. It felt like arriving.

Build one piece of furniture.

Pick one thing in your day that doesn't move. Same walk, same hour, same first thing. Do it every day this week. Then add one more next week.

Make the small plan. Just hold it loosely enough to leave room for what you didn't plan for.

Episode 17 is live now. A Suitcase and a Dog. Sunday is the Reset, Week 9 of 47.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.